


Oil and Water Studies

by Querulousgawks



Series: Tumblr Prompts [11]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Adjusting to college, F/M, Female Friendship, Gen, Pre-Series, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 09:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6234091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Querulousgawks/pseuds/Querulousgawks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You'd think her friendship with the team would be the yardstick, or maybe her paintings, or at least her attitude towards attending vs skipping art history surveys - but no, Lardo measures how much Samwell has changed her against the unwavering invariant that is her freshman roommate. <em>Sharon.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Oil and Water Studies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MimiLaRue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MimiLaRue/gifts).



> For Mimi, who tumblr-prompted "Shitty and Lardo. Post-it notes."

You'd think her friendship with the team would be the yardstick, or maybe her paintings, or at least her attitude towards attending vs skipping art history surveys - but no, Lardo measures how much Samwell has changed her against the unwavering invariant that is her freshman roommate. _Sharon._

Sharon is - well. Sharon isn’t what she was imagining when she first saw Samwell brochures, wrote and rewrote her essays, shook over the acceptance letter (in private) and sweated over her FAFSA (at the all-too-public kitchen table, under her mother's silent, skeptical regard.) Sharon is a six-foot business major from Minnesota with an impressive shot glass collection for someone under the drinking age. All of this gets shared the instant brand-new Wellie Larissa Duan walks into a dorm room already pretty much full. Of Sharon. 

It takes Larissa forever to figure out if Sharon is anything else, mostly because she backs right out of that dorm room and starts looking into campus vagrancy as an option. It's an impulse decision that she doesn't really regret: it leads her to Founder's and Faber and the third floor of the art library that's fucking freezing but deserted and gets really good light. But none of those (sacred, life-changing) places actually let you move in, so she spends her first fall at college lurking, wearing the same clothes for days at a time, and communicating with her roommate mostly through post-it notes.

_Out tonight._

_YEAH ME TOO! Drinking hard or hardly drinking, girl?_

_Art library tonight._

_You can SHELVE PAINTINGS?_

_No...light's good, back in the afternoon._

_Is that a code word for THE SEX??_

There are more in between, but that’s the one that makes Larissa crack. She leaves the next note in her sink cubby, where it seems like Sharon might be stealth-cleaning during the long absences she's starting to feel inescapably guilty about.

_...Sharon, are you fucking with me?_

When she comes home that night, there's a stack of post-its stuck to her laundry bag.

_Larissa!_

_Dumb boring me??_

_The let-down of your housing match-up survey?_

_With her shitty half-naked boyband posters?_

_Instead of ART?_

_Like a REAL WELLIE?_

_No way. Impossible._

_Just like the earwig I saw crawl out of here yesterday._

_Probably time to do your laundry, sweetie._

Mostly because of earwig-related panic, it takes Larissa a minute to make out the tiny drawings in the bottom of the notes. They make a flip book, of a hand - or rather a fist, with one finger unfurling over seven pink pages.

So maybe Larissa was a little quick to judge. She makes her largest piece of work to date shortly after, on the bedsheet gone ubleachably dingy from a semester of laundry avoidance.

SORRY I WAS SUCH AN EARWIG.

She paints the letters two feet high in pastel, flowery script, then uses eyeliner to sketch in the insects. You can only see them up close. It stays on the inside of Sharon's sink cubby door their whole time at Samwell.

Things get better, after that, but they never really break the post-it habit. So that's how Sharon finds out about Jack, then hockey, then Shitty - in between _Laundry tomorrow for sure,_ and _Please drink that vodka girl it's my gift to you also I never want to look at it again._ It's:

_I saw that bruise Larissa, tell me who to put in the woodchipper._

_It's fine. I went skating. Tried skating. Don't kill anybody._

_Even the scowly one?_

_His face is just like that, I think._

And:

_I did not need to know what a jock strap looks like, Duan._

_Shit, sorry, hockey hazing._

Then, after only a few games as manager:

_DON'T FUCK THE ONE WITH THE MUSTACHE._

Lardo - she's Lardo by now, after a whole run-through with Ransom & Holster that they made sound super-casual but probably had an Excel sheet behind it. Which she can respect, now that's she's really seeing the holes in the last manager's dirty-trapper-keeper system of equipment inventory. Anyway, Lardo wastes a whole stack of post-its over the last command. 

_What._

_Sharon._

_Why would you think -_

_I hardly even_

_Wouldn't you think Jack, if anybody?_

_Shitty's just -_

_He talks too much, I wouldn't even -_

_Wait was this a trap? I will DO THE LAUNDRY_

_SHARON._

"He looks like he's crazy about you, that's all," Sharon says when Lardo finally traps her in the room. Lardo makes a noise like their electric kettle left too long, and Sharon drops the issue of _The Economist_ she'd been hiding behind."I mean - lots of them do, but you usually put the fear of God into them first thing, and they stop letting it show. And you've known this guy for _weeks,_ now”.

"Huh." Lardo sits down slowly in her laundry basket, only partly in revenge. Sharon takes in a sharp breath, then determinedly picks up the magazine again and shields her eyes with it. 

“I know you’ve already read that one.” Lardo says, momentarily distracted from that revelation. ( _And aren’t you happy to be distracted from it - running from your problems, Duan?)_ she thinks, but soldiers on, “You’re only keeping it out to make me look at the cover.” It’s an article on art deals and finance - like, she’s touched by Sharon’s faith in her, but it’s the _spring semester of their freshman year_ , and something about the narrow print and authorlessness of that magazine makes her want to put it through a shredder. Then spray-paint the pile of scraps, maybe with something flourescent. She can’t: Sharon saves back issues in publication order in those half-carton magazine holders, and would absolutely kill her if one went missing. Whatever. _Shitty_ would appreciate it...and might also have a subscription she could destroy, actually. It’s the kind of thing she likes and hates about him, all the rich-person trappings that he disdains, is willing to trash, but buys like clockwork just the same. Lardo shakes off the thought, and pushes on with Operation Talk About Anything But Shitty: “I’m not learning how to market art before I learn how to _make_ it.” This sounds like bullshit even as it leaves her mouth, which is kind of the point. Unlike Lardo’s parents, Sharon will never start an argument about practicality, but she can usually be drawn into one when Lardo feels like poking the bruise. Or creating a distraction. 

But this time Sharon won’t be baited - all Lardo gets is a skeptical _hmm._ Then: "At least make him pose for something first. Evaluate his stamina," she says from behind the page. 

And that's -huh.

Lardo is not going to sleep with Shitty, _God_. But...she had been thinking of trying a life drawing, even though she hadn't gotten into the class for it yet. A big one, and you had to pay the art department's models, but it's not like the whole damn team doesn't owe her a favor for the equipment turnover. Forget shredding _The Economist,_ she could do a whole series on - "On masculinity," she says thoughtfully. 

" _Samwell_ ," Sharon mutters under her breath, but she sounds fond. Grinning, Lardo flops backward into her laundry pile and thinks about scavenging canvas.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized after writing this that Sharon was probably a mix of Parker from Veronica Mars and Christina from Pamela Dean's perfect book about college, Tam Lin. Conclusion: my OC's are never all that O, and Check Please fanfic needs more crossovers, maybe?


End file.
